A pilot, an axe, and the background check gap

The Vetted Workplace

Real hiring mistakes. Real red flags. Real fixes.

According to reports, one airline took a pilot off flight duty over concerns about his views. Months later, another airline put him in a cockpit. Whatever the investigations conclude, the hiring question is already on the table: why didn't the warning travel?

What Has Been Reported So Far

On 30 September 2026, an Omani co-pilot on flydubai flight FZ1073, bound for Israel, reportedly attacked the captain with a cockpit axe and tried to take control of the aircraft, according to the Associated Press. Passengers and crew subdued him and the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia. The UAE has described the incident as an attempted terrorist attack.

The part that matters for employers: AP and others report that Oman Air had previously barred him from flying over concerns about alleged extremist views and moved him to an administrative role. Al Jazeera's analysis of how he was cleared notes that a Gulf diplomat said he underwent standard security checks before being hired, but it was not clear how far that vetting went. Israel's Transportation Ministry said flydubai had committed to carrying out background checks on its crews, and that the ministry itself never received the crew list.

A few things are not known: what exactly Oman Air's concerns were, whether they were ever shared with a later employer, and what flydubai actually asked. Investigations are ongoing and this newsletter is not going to guess. What we can do is look at the hiring gap this exposes, because it is a gap that exists in almost every industry, in every country.

Our Position: "Clean Record" Is the Wrong Test

Here is the uncomfortable claim: for any role where one person's failure can hurt other people, a criminal-record check is not a background check. It is a courtesy.

Criminal databases record what the state has already proven. The warnings that matter most before something goes wrong are the ones that never reach a court: a person quietly moved off duty, a role restricted, a resignation that came with a conversation nobody wrote down. Those facts live with a previous employer, and employers are very reluctant to share them. They fear defamation claims, so most will confirm a job title and dates and nothing more.

That is the part we think the industry should be arguing about, and where we will take a side:

• Silence is not neutral. When employers can't safely disclose documented, factual restrictions on someone's duties, the risk doesn't disappear. It moves to the next employer, and to the public.
• Regulators should make the safe path the easy one. For safety-critical roles, factual and documented disclosure between employers should be protected, and hiring employers should be expected to ask. Some sectors already work this way. The US, for instance, built a national pilot records database for exactly this reason.
• A one-time check is a photograph. Someone can pass a screening on day one and change afterwards. For sensitive roles, verification should be repeated, not filed away.

Reasonable people will disagree, especially on information-sharing and privacy. But it is hard to defend the current default, where a flag can sit in one company's files while the person walks into another company's cockpit, trading floor or server room.

The Guardrail That Keeps This Fair

None of this is an argument for suspecting people because of their nationality, religion, surname or politics. That is discrimination, and it is also bad screening, because it produces noise instead of evidence.

The standard has to be documented conduct and verified facts: a role restriction, a recorded safety concern, a confirmed gap in the story. Not rumor, and not assumption. Even in this case, one claim reported in the press, that the co-pilot had undergone radicalization, was made without evidence being offered, per AP. A good verification process labels what is confirmed and what is only alleged, and never lets the second pass as the first.

The Fix, for Any Safety-Critical Hire

This is not only about aviation. The same logic applies to a finance controller, a data administrator, a driver, a clinician or a vendor who touches your systems.

• Check the whole employment trail, not just the latest job. A long tenure followed by short stints and fast moves isn't proof of anything, but it is a reason to call the earlier employers.
• Ask the previous employer for more than dates. Verify the role held, any change in duties and the status at exit, through an independent channel and not through contacts the candidate supplies.
• Escalate with the risk. Standard checks for standard roles; deeper due diligence for sensitive ones. We showed how that played out in a CXO hire where level-one checks came back clean.
• Don't let a document stand in for a source. Papers can be forged, as we saw with education stamps and offer letters.
• Re-verify on a schedule. Treat the first check as the start of a record, not the end of one.

This is the thinking behind how we structure verification at Millow: independent sources over supplied paperwork, employer-level confirmation beyond job titles, deeper due diligence for senior or sensitive roles, and verification that continues instead of stopping at the offer letter. No process can promise to catch everything. But a process built only to confirm that someone has no criminal record will, by design, miss most of what matters.

How executive due diligence caught hidden kickbacks before a CXO hire →

Why a "clean" background check missed undisclosed court cases →

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